


How Do You Sleep?

by GillianGrissom



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Everyone angsts, F/M, Gen, I didn't do much by way of research, Life after the Demogorgon, Possibly Anachronistic for the 80's, Sleep and lack thereof, Written while five minutes from a Benadryl coma, but what do you expect when they've survived what they did
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-27 18:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12087135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GillianGrissom/pseuds/GillianGrissom
Summary: Eventually, everyone who knows anything about what happened to Will, even if it's only in the vaguest "he disappeared and was presumed dead and then found again," sort of way, asks how they're doing. Every one of them says "I'm just glad he's okay," or "He's home, that's the important part," or "thank you for asking, I'll let him know you said hello and you're praying for him."None of them can ever say how they're actually doing.





	How Do You Sleep?

Eventually, everyone who knows anything about what happened to Will, even if it's only in the vaguest "he disappeared and was presumed dead and then found again," sort of way, asks how they're doing. Every one of them says "I'm just glad he's okay," or "He's home, that's the important part," or "thank you for asking, I'll let him know you said hello and you're praying for him." 

None of them can ever say how they're actually doing.

Three different doctors prescribe three different sleep aids before Nancy’s mother realizes why Nancy refuses to take any of them. It wasn’t the doctors’ faults, but really, but Nancy hated each one a little more than the last. They’re experts, her mother tells her, specialists in insomnia and grief and the last one in something that sounds a lot like World War II shell shock to the part of Nancy that has been studying how soldiers survive after trauma. How could these experts not know that giving Nancy something to help her sleep would only trap her in her nightmares?

Jonathan gets one very expensive visit, to one very expensive doctor, and gets one prescription they can’t afford. He feels so guilty about it that he insists on paying for it, even though it means he has to work double shifts every evening he can, and despite the fact the pills only make everything worse. Nancy told him that her pills trap her in her nightmares, that she can’t wake up from them if she’s taken any of them. His paralyze him. They leave him unable to move, to act, leave him to only listen to the sound of Will screaming and choking. His mother sobs, rages against the world. Chief Hopper, who he’s relatively certain he isn’t supposed to know lurks in their kitchen at night like some kind of guard dog, beats the walls and screams for a little girl that’s been dead for five years, and for a boy who is still dying.

He hasn’t figured out yet if he’s actually hearing all the things he thinks he is, or if he’s hallucinating. He’s afraid to ask. 

Hopper stops pretending to be okay, at least with Joyce. Almost losing Will there in the Upside Down had been almost as traumatic for him as it had been for her, a horrific mirror of when he hadn’t been able to save the child. A taunting reminder of when sickness, a monster in its own right and one he couldn’t fight, had taken his daughter from him. So he follows Joyce home from one of Will’s doctor visits, and they sit around her kitchen table, nursing cups of coffee they both wish was something stronger and mumbling back and forth at each other. She’s too quiet for him to make out what she’s saying, and he’s certain she can’t hear him either, but they pour everything that’s happened to them and the children there onto Joyce’s kitchen floor. He imagines he can see it sometimes, a festering pile of the meat moss of the Upside Down, lingering and haunting them. So on nights he can’t sleep, or she can’t sleep but can’t stand to risk waking her boys with her worry, he goes back to that chair in her kitchen, standing guard over all the rot they’ve left there, the nightmares that had to go somewhere.

(Mike sleeps as much as he can, for as long as he can, because when he sleeps he dreams of _Her_.)

For the first few weeks, Joyce lays awake, listening to the sounds of the world, more than she sleeps. She knows every sound the house makes, every creak and groan. She can catalog every noise the nighttime creatures around her house make, from the gentle crunch of rabbits hopping through dry leaves to the more aggressive sounds of dogs and coyotes, of the predators in the bush. She can tell, within two breaths, where everyone in the house is, just based on that breathing. She knows who, too, from only that sound. Will’s breath is raspy, weak. The doctors say his throat is similar to a person who has been on a ventilator for weeks, and it should heal on its own. Joyce can’t shake the nightmare vision of the tentacle they’d pulled out of him. Jonathan’s breath is deeper, but faster. He’s like her. He’s always afraid. Hopper’s breath is deep, slow, controlled. At first listen his breath sounds like the predators outside, but listen closer and you’ll hear the breath of a man always about to lose control, to shatter in to a million pieces at the wrong word.

(Mike’s dreams now are always nightmares. He dreams of stepping off a cliff, of Eleven not saving him, of her face as he plummets to the water below.)

Steve has nightmares for the monster for a while, but they pass. He keeps the spiked baseball bat, but while it stays under his bed for a few weeks, it eventually moves into his closet. He does, however, buy a new bat and a box of nails, which he leaves in Jonathan’s car one afternoon after school. 

Steve had, after all, been able to take a swing at the Demogorgon. He had felt its flesh give way under the bat, had heard its rage. He wouldn’t have been able to kill it, and he doesn’t pretend he would have. But he had hurt it with his own two hands. 

(Mike dreams of Eleven reaching for him, her nose and ears bleeding, of his own brain being turned to pulp under her power.)

Dustin turns to Dungeons and Dragons to conquer his nightmares. He talks his mom into buying him the Monster Manual the Demogorgon appears in. He takes pages and pages of notes, more even than the book even has in it. He makes detailed descriptions of every method he can find to kill it. Lucas screams at him once that the Demogorgon isn’t real, that the monster they’d watched Eleven destroy hadn’t been the stupid two headed toy from the game. Dustin screams back that Eleven didn’t kill it in his nightmares, that his life, all their lives, depend on a roll of the dice and how fast he can think.

(Mike watches the Demogorgon’s mouth close around his head. The last thing he sees before its jaws close is Eleven’s face.)

Lucas sleeps with the wrist rocket strapped to arm, a pile of pilfered golf balls and sharp-edged stones beside his bed. He dreams of the moment he’d believed the wrist rocket had beaten the Demogorgon and the ugly triumph that it had been him who had killed it, not the freak stealing his best friend, and wakes with a bone-deep guilt he can’t shake.

(Mike dreams of Eleven leading him into the Upside Down and leaving him there.)

(Mike dreams of Eleven pulling him into the sensory deprivation tank they had built in the school gymnasium. He dreams of the rest of his life, blind, deaf and mute and ungodly alone forever.)

(Mike dreams of the Demogorgon and other monsters from the Upside Down taking Nancy, taking his parents, Holly, Lucas, Dustin, Jonathan, Mrs. Byers and Chief Hopper. Last of all, it drags Will, screaming and coughing, closer to him, then peels his face back to reveal the Demogorgon inside him. Eleven stands facing him, but never once makes eye contact.)

Will only dreams of the Upside Down. He won’t tell anyone he never dreams when he’s asleep. 

(Mike sleeps as much as he can, for as long as he can, because when he sleeps he dreams of _Her_.)

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like every fandom has an obligatory fic that every author in that fandom takes a crack at at some point. In Stranger Things, that fic is "How does everyone live after the Demogorgon?" This is mine. I took some benadryl last night because my allergies are going haywire, then in the midst of reading other Stranger Things fanfiction I jotted down the Nancy paragraph of this one and took off from there. I cleaned it up some when I typed it today, but let me know what you think of the structure, if you don't mind. I thought about putting a Mike paragraph between each of the other characters', but then I liked the way the repeated Mike paragraphs at the end felt like they were building towards the idea that even though all his dreams are nightmares where Eleven kills him or doesn't save him, he still wants to dream of her.
> 
> (Long author's note is long.)
> 
> The idea that Hopper sits at the Byer's dinner table like some kind of protector was more or less directly ripped from "hidden shelters" by fakelight (http://archiveofourown.org/works/7951075/chapters/18180283), and you should definitely go read it because it is an amazing fic.


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